On the one hand, you’ve never had so many people who desperately want a disease to be beaten, so you should see a mile-long line of people waiting to get Covid vaccines when they come out.
On the other hand, whatever Covid vaccines that do emerge will have been produced far more rapidly than the standard flu shot or anything, owing to the urgency of the situation. This has suddenly given some credibility to the anti-vaxxing cause because now some people can say “I don’t want something so hurried and rushed being injected into me” and actually sound reasonable.
So which side is benefiting more from coronavirus; the pro-vax or anti-vax?
Many people don’t take the disease seriously, and are irate that everything is being shut down over the virus. They get angry at being told to wear masks or not to gather. They believe all kinds of nonsense conspiracy theories including a variety of “natural health cures”. The malaria drug was particularly badly handled (so many trials were conducted and ended early as it wasn’t helping and was sometimes even harmful, but they will see that as a coverup).
In the end, the disease won’t wipe out even 1% of the population, probably, so they’ll claim that this wasn’t nearly as bad as we were told. (Most people would consider over 140,000 people dead to be a big deal, but they’ll compare it to a population of over 300 million and think it’s not a bit deal.)
The thing that scares me is that the pressure to get a vaccine out before the election might cause a reduction in vaccine safety. People getting sick due to the vaccine is going to help the anti-vaxxer movement a lot. It can happen - one of the places that manufactured the first polio vaccine screwed up and didn’t kill the virus - and people got polio from the vaccine.
I’m not sure I’d want to be one of rhe first getting the vaccine, but that’s not because I don’t trust science. It is because I don’t trust Trump.
In most of Canada you must be vaccinated against measles, mumps, and rubella (among others) to attend school. It hasn’t stopped the anti-vax movement here. If anything, people complain of “government interference” and try to get exemptions or even homeschool.
Mandatory vaccination laws haven’t weakened the anti-vaxxer movement yet because the anti-vaxxers find ways around them. In WA state, naturopaths readily sign forms saying kid can’t get vaccinated for medical reasons. AV’s also claim it’s against their religion, even if they’re not religious. Or they home school.
The anti-vaxxers I know are pinning their hopes on convalescent plasma.
The current aggressive multi-directional disinformation campaign against a vaccine that doesn’t even exist yet will massively expand (has already expanded?) the anti-vaxxing populace as applied specifically to COVID.
I’m going to bet that the coat-tails of that movement will greatly expand generalized anti-vaxxing too. Once a person is willing to accept the CTs and uber-Libertarian nonsense being promulgated towards COVID shots, it’s but a tiny step farther to apply the same illogic to flu, measles, etc., shots.
If indeed there are a some accidents early in the mass roll-out of the COVID vaccine, and it’s almost a statistical certainty there will be, that will form the tiny nugget of legit logic necessary to build a snow-boulder’s worth of bullshit that even the sorta sensible but overcautious overprotective Soccer Moms, not just the CTers, will readily believe.
Like so many of Trump’s legacies this is gonna be yuuge!
I think people being exposed to the scientific method in real time is going to push people’s trust in science and medicine back. Not people who understand that science takes time, but your regular Joe Frustrated? Yeah, we’re going to lose them.
Being that a vaccine wasn’t available immediately when “the flu vaccine is ready every year” is a problem. Theories being “wrong” (or really inconclusive) as we learn more is a problem. Testing rates being “manipulated” and everything supposedly being mis-reported is a problem. People who are “doctors” (PhD in ecomomics) writing op-eds about infection rates being wrong, and everyone knowing all sorts of doctors who say it’s a hoax and masks are a hoax is a problem.
Science takes a really long time, and the longer time you have the better results you end up with. With people who don’t understand or don’t care for the scientific method breathing down your neck, science doesn’t look as good anymore.
I think there could be huge steps back in science, unless some really great things happen (but then…will that set an unreachable precedent for future medical science?!)
The current conversation about vaccines is really skewed by the fact that we don’t have one yet. So all this talk of compulsory vaccination is really getting ahead of ourselves … once a vaccine actually exists in the first place, it’s going to be really hard to get hold of for quite some time. Anti-vaxxers are all welcome to put themselves to the back of the queue as far as I’m concerned, and a couple of years of ‘you don’t want a vaccine? Great! More likely that I can get one!’ is bound to percolate into even the dimmest mind sooner or later. The scarcity effect is a real thing - once people realise that a vaccine is a real thing and they actually can’t have one yet, even if they want it because all the health workers and school teachers have to get it first, it’s going to get a lot more desirable.
I don’t think that it will increase the numbers of the movement, just give them something else to disingenuously complain about.
There are reasons that this vaccine may be flawed, if it comes at all, and have unintended consequences. That only speaks to how important it is to study vaccines and disease, and does nothing to discredit the vaccines that have been in use and studied for decades.
Any COVID-19 vaccine will be approved on an expedited schedule. There is some reasonable chance that there will be problems that only on post marketing surveillance when you go from a trial of maybe 30K to millions of doses administered in short order. It is just exaggerated standard operating procedure but the perception of its being rushed will make any issues that show up after approval, even issues that turn out to be coincidental, major fodder for antivax social media. Especially as the disease passes its peak.
So you think the disease will pass its peak before a vaccine is available? Do you anticipate it will take that long for a vaccine to become available, or are you confident that it’s going to peak soon? If the latter, on what are you basing this confidence?
My fear and unfortunate expectation is that the worst of COVID-19 will be during this Fall and Winter, overlapping with influenza season. I am very afraid that many regions that think they have beat it will see major outbreaks then. I will be very surprised if a vaccine is released for wide distribution before next Spring, if then, if ever, and am sure that bad things will happen within a week or two of some receiving the vaccines, which many will know someone who says their cousin had it happen. Maybe even something not only coincidental.
In any case even pandemics with multiple waves peak. Unless immunity from disease and vaccination is permanent (doubtful) we will be dealing with getting herd immunity levels of people vaccinated on some interval basis after it has peaked and is instead some endemic to seasonally or intermittently recurring thing.
To be clear I do not think that there is any reason to be hopeful that a sudden surge of seasonal HCoVs will lead to mitigation of COVID-19 but @nelliebly on what are you basing this assertion with such confidence?
The article’s main thrust is to model how throwing a third HCoV, SARS-HCoV-2, would play into those multi-year transmission dynamics, at different levels of assumed cross-immunity and of seasonal forcing (actual levels being unknown at this time).